Footnote

It's sad to see a good idea fizzle, and that's what's happened to Occupy Baltimore ("The 1 percent are winning," Sept. 18). But, the movement didn't just "fizzle," it committed suicide. I never pitched a tent in McKeldin Square. However, I did spend time discussing issues, stood with a homemade "Bring Back Glass-Steagall" sign on the corner of Light and Pratt streets and marched in a "Save Post Office Jobs" picket line. Occupy Baltimore's inability to communicate is much to blame for its apparent deterioration.

It's sad to see a good idea fizzle, and that's what's happened to Occupy Baltimore ("The 1 percent are winning," Sept. 18). But, the movement didn't just "fizzle," it committed suicide. I never pitched a tent in McKeldin Square. However, I did spend time discussing issues, stood with a homemade "Bring Back Glass-Steagall" sign on the corner of Light and Pratt streets and marched in a "Save Post Office Jobs" picket line. Occupy Baltimore's inability to communicate is much to blame for its apparent deterioration.

This is not a story from my media beat. It's only a footnote to the story in the Baltimore Sun this week about City Councilman Robert Curran telling a resident in his district that if he wanted to get police to respond more quickly to a 911 call, he should lie and tell them there is a gun involved. Just a footnote, but I think it's an important one. You can read the story by Sun reporter Rebekah Brown here . I was the resident who...

Over the weekend, a demolition crew turned One, a chic night club for most of the last decade, into a pile of brick, broken cinderblock and sand. If you're of a certain age and missed One's run as a nightclub, you will know this location, at Guilford Avenue and Saratoga Street, as House of Welsh Corner. Instead of big dance floors and theatrically-lighted bars stocked with Dom Perignon, you'll think of a classic Baltimore tavern that served sizzling steaks on metal plates and Maryland whiskey at a bar without stools.

Kathleen Townsend entered this political season a Kennedy and exits it an afterthought. Parris Glendening brought her into his gubernatorial race in early summer, to a great splash of publicity, and since then nobody's even heard her name on a television commercial.Who can figure these things? This is a woman picked for her name recognition, but nobody's even mentioned it in the last four months. Her selection, which seemed inspired to some and cynical to others, has now become a mere footnote to this campaign.

Washington -- Eileen Welsome found her future in a footnote.In the tiny type of a scholarly report on animal experiments, the Albuquerque Tribune reporter learned that American scientists had injected people with plutonium nearly 50 years ago to learn how the deadly substance would travel through the body.That bit of information sent her on a six-year journey that finally opened to public scrutiny a shocking and hidden chapter in atomic history and has made her a contender for a Pulitzer Prize for reporting.

The Devil's Details: A History of the Footnote, by Chuck Zerby (Invisible Cities Press, 150 pages, $24). Perhaps you wholeheartedly agree with Noel Coward's famous dictum that "Having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love." If so, Chuck Zerby may not win you over to his unflinching enthusiasm for the footnote as both irreplaceably valuable and indelibly entertaining. The usage began some time in the mid 1500s, he relates in this charming, witty history and exploration of the formal written aside.

I went to Garrison Junior High School yesterday, to look for a footnote to the nation's history. The footnote was gone, and so was Garrison Junior High. The new name on the building is Garrison Middle School. The footnote lost inside is racial integration.I went looking for its remnants, which were there when I left Garrison only 34 years ago. I was 15 years old at the time, and moving on to senior high. Public school integration was 6 years old, and already moving toward national footnote status.

As punctuation marks go, it's hard to top the asterisk - because the asterisk is there to top everything else. The asterisk always gets the last word. It adds a dubious, "Well, yes, but ..." The asterisk is the elbow in the ribs, the wink, the smirk, the disclaimer, the qualification. It's hard to love the asterisk, just as it's hard to love a smarty-pants showoff. The asterisk looks like a tick on the page and, fittingly, often seems to suck the lifeblood out of a bold, forthright statement by sly insinuation: "Let's not be too hasty," the asterisk implies.

This is not a story from my media beat. It's only a footnote to the story in the Baltimore Sun this week about City Councilman Robert Curran telling a resident in his district that if he wanted to get police to respond more quickly to a 911 call, he should lie and tell them there is a gun involved. Just a footnote, but I think it's an important one. You can read the story by Sun reporter Rebekah Brown here . I was the resident who...

The marijuana smoke filled the Baltimore rowhouse in a "haze" that "engulfed" the four people sitting around the kitchen table, all of them within arm's reach of the smoldering remains of a "blunt" in an ashtray. One of the men appeared "groovy" and "relaxed" and was "just going with the program. " It was, the state's highest court said in a ruling issued Friday, "reminiscent of a scene from a Cheech & Chong movie. " Baltimore police had burst into the Lanvale Street rowhouse on Dec. 6, 2006, and arrested the men at the table, including Clavon Smith, who police said also had 15 small bags of marijuana in the pocket of his black leather jacket, which was hanging from the back of a chair.

A WEEK AGO today I returned from a six-week visit to Angola, Madagascar and India. After 13 flights, three overnight trains, two boats and what seemed like a thousand miles on rutted, flooded roadways, the conclusion is that getting there decidedly is not part of the fun. In Angola, the first leg of this Third World odyssey was spent on roadways that have not been much improved since the end of the civil war that gripped that country for nearly 30...

While the other nine teams of elementary school pupils waited nervously - some wringing their hands, others closing their eyes - as the final scores were tallied, the team from Deep Creek Elementary School in Essex sat back confidently. Keeping their own score as they answered nine rounds of questions about African-American history and current events, the team members knew they would be crowned elementary school champions of this year's Black Saga Competition. And when the quiz-show-like contest, held yesterday at the University of Maryland, College Park campus, was over, they were.

Louis S. "Shorty" Levin said later that he sensed something odd when his shipwrecking company sold that rundown troop carrier shortly after World War II. He and his older brother, George, sold scrap metal in Charles County, but the men in New York interested in this particular ship talked about carrying passengers, as the ship had before the war when it steamed the Old Bay Line route from Baltimore to Norfolk, Va. Indeed the deal turned out quite unlike...

One was a distinguished Army surgeon, destined to go down in history as the man who solved one of medicine's most baffling and vexing mysteries. The other, a lesser-known clinician who'd studied in Baltimore, was a fearless medical adventurer who placed his own life on the line in the search for a cure. Together, just more than a century ago, Walter Reed and James Carroll helped rid the world of the yellow fever menace - but not before surviving a personal relationship that veered from mutual respect to jealousy and distrust before their time together was through.

Vernon Smith's bank is paying him 12 percent less on his money than he thought he was getting."What?" Mr. Smith said yesterday as he left the downtown office of Sovran Bank/Maryland. He paused, looking confused. "If I'm losing like that, that's a whale of a loss."With profits down and competition steep, a growing number of bank have stopped paying interest on 12 percent of their customers' checking-account balances.The argument is this: Because the Federal Reserve requires that 12 percent of these balances be held in reserve, banks shouldn't have to pay interest on money they can't touch.

If you're heading off to college with a new computer (or you're a parent who just made the investment for your son or daughter), chances are you spent a lot more time worrying about the new hardware than the software that runs on it.Before the school year gets too far along, it's a good idea to take a look at the software you're using and see if it meets your needs. If it doesn't, a visit to the college bookstore can turn up some real bargains in top-of-the-line programs, thanks to publishers who are willing to take lower profits today in an effort to hook tomorrow's corporate PC users.

By Marc Weingarten and Marc Weingarten,NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE | January 3, 2005

Leslie S. Klinger is not one of those Sherlock Holmes obsessives who feel compelled to actually live as if they were distant relatives of the fictional detective. He doesn't greet visitors wearing a deerstalker hat and an Inverness cape, and his cheerful contemporary home in Malibu, Calif., is a far cry from the Victorian lodging house at 221B Baker St. where Holmes and his trusty sidekick, Dr. John Watson, lived in London. But as Holmes himself could attest, first impressions can be deceiving.